Posted
by
Hemos
on Thursday December 14, 2000 @03:55PM
from the what's-left- dept.

ZeroLogic writes "According to zdnet Corel is getting out of the Linux Business." According to the article, the exact dollar amounts are unknown, although $5 million in cash and 20% in the company that's doing the purchase. It's a venture capital firm called "Linx Global Partners". I wonder how this will impact .NET and Corel's participation.

I had tried corel Linux (actually, I got 1.0 for christmas last year) And hated it.
Basically they tried to make it as much like windows as possible, and it just made it suck, because it was to simplified.
I used Windows straight up until about 2 years ago, and now use Linux for internet and typing, and some games, and use windows only for games that don't have linux releases, so its not like I hate windows terribly, but I use Linux because it's "cool" and not windows (I love Gnome), so it was bad to see a distro look so much like windows.
Anywho, I'm sure it won't kill corel to much.

A great conspirisy but likely not true. Corel has been laying off people and whatever else they could do to keep things going. Corel's Linux was really Michael Cowpland's baby and it is surprising they kept it this long after his departure.

A top-ranking development engineer from Corel was quoted as saying, "It was baffling. How could they [the management] expect us to build our distribution without access to RedHat's RPMS? I mean, seriously! We can't make a distribution without those files! [sic]" He then returned to his game of computer solitaire, which he lost. Eleven times.

"However, in the Tribunal's view, in order to declare the complainant's proposal compliant, the Department had no choice but to evaluate the software proposed in the complainant's offer and submitted for evaluation. This software had to be capable of importing PowerPoint version 4.0 files. The software submitted by the complainant failed to meet this requirement."

Whether or not you think it's fair or not is immaterial. The fact that they didn't show up with the correct version makes no difference. Rules are rules, and investigation of the whole thing proved the reviewers right.

Corel's distro was the closest Linux has ever been to "easy". The installer was simplified, the file manager (my favorite part) was very windows-like. I wouldn't doubt that these things struck a chord with Bill and co... what if regular users could install and use Linux by themselves?

In my experience, Corel Linux is one of the least functional distributions I've ever seen. I am now an extremely happy user of Mandrake, so I know Linux isn't all that bad.

Getting Licq to work on Corel Linux was hell, because I couldn't find any.DEB packages to go to it, and compiling the program would generate a random error (can't find the host-cpu type? I mean, wtf?) because it lacks the most basic developmental tools. And YES, I installed Desktop Plus, for all of you that care.

And on top of that, Corel Linux would be no more stable than a typical Microsoft Win9x installation. Random reboots and freezes would be common, other times it would just kick you back to the login prompt.

Gnome on Corel Linux. Don't make me laugh, I don't want to think about it. Either you bend over and take their modified KDE desktop, or be forced to work with the command line (not that that's a bad thing).

The only surprisingly good thing was that the install was smooth, and it didn't choke when it detected my hardware.

it was sort-of expected.
I remember when corel first announced its involvement with linux telling a windows-powered:) friend of mine how this has the potential to change the face of linux. However corel made several BIG mistakes:

Their distribution is always out of date (sort of like the stable branch of debian:)

Kept adding/backporting staff to KDE 1.1 which eventually ended up in KDE2 (corel wrote a great file-manager for KDE1, but there's konqueror now!), which (KDE2) was never included in their distro

No support of gnome.

WINE-I can understand that it seemed like idea to use wine for huge projects like corel draw etc. But why use wine for wordperfect?! Corel was one of the very few companies to actually have a native linux wordprocessor (wordperfect 8). Why ditch that and go with wine? This essentially ripped people off. And the so WPO 2000 was _extremely_ unstable, was an extreme pain to install under modern (i.e. XF86-4.0) distros, and VERY slow! I can run office2000 PERFECTLY on a p200 under win2k. WPO-2000 was unresponsive in my k6-2 400 & 192MB of ram. Plus during one crash, it decided to trash my current document (and the backup) leaving me frustrated to say the least. And how can wpo2000 compete with Staroffice which is free?

No download/evaluation/free version (apart from photo-paint)

Crappy installer: the installer for wpo2000 depended on a certain utility (which I cannot remember at the moment). If your distro didn't have it, the installer would not install ANYTHING, but it would report that installation went perfectly ok! Can you say q&a? Plus the installer wasn't at all customisable! At least the office installer lets you change install locations, install parts of the applications etc. Not so for corel's installer

slow-slow-slow (I know I mentioned that:)

The "you must be 18 to install this product issue" (there was a really cool UF cartoon about it:)

After wpo was released, they stopped contributing to wine

Fontastic: Why the hell do I need _ANOTHER_ font server for an application? My fontserver already had ttf support! And installing fonts to fontastic was a pain...
Bye-bye corel... it sure was a nice dream...

Who didn't see this coming?
First, floundering to scratch out a market for themselves in the post-Corel wonder years with Linux, then realizing that they're not making any money.
My question is why didn't they ever release Corel Draw, Paint and other suite products? I beta tested some of them - progress WAS made!
Whatever. Corel has had the anti-Midas touch for years now. Time to move on folks, nothing to see here.

Any graphical artists out there using CorelDraw?
Didn't think so...oh wait, you say you do? Well then, you're obviously not a real graphical artist.
CorelDraw is the _worst_ graphics suite ever made, period. Any artist who has ever tried to use it knew right away that it was written by people whom had no idea what graphics are or how they are made, in the tangible or electronic world.

Before I started using PShop many years ago, I tried Corel Draw, and guess how long it took to decide that MSPaint was the clear winner?

I can take WP going out. I just wish that someone else would create a word processor that has the functionality of Reveal Codes. I think that Macromedia is actually headed that way with the latest version of Dreamweaver--I know, that's a web development program not a word processor, but the idea is there.

If there were a free program with reveal codes and the tag system WP uses, I would start using it now.

Linux and BSD are at a crossroads. The operating systems are complete. They are stable. Now its time to do something with them. Distributions now need to differentiate themselves by their target audience. One of these audiences is the average non-hacker desktop user. Corel was correct to target this market. Some other distros are making a mistake by trying to make a one-size-fits-all distribution.

But they did it the wrong way. The set it up so that they were always "following" Debian. They forked KDE, making the users ask "keep the Corel file manager or upgrade to KDE 1.1.2?" They bombed on marketing. It wouldn't install on a lot of systems.

But their target market still needs their own distribution. They don't want to wade through six or seven CDs trying to figure out what packages they need and what they don't. They want an easy to use installer, not a GUI wrapper. They want it small enough to be able to learn it. They want a browsable package installer/updater. They want compatibility with other distributions.

All of the parts are there, but only Corel ever got around to putting it all together. Some distros need to become the "server" distros, others the "hacker" distros, and some could be the "kitchen sink" distros. But at least one needs to be the "man on the street" distro.

I have to say that as an ex Corel Linux employee (thankfully it as already my last day when I was greated with/.'s headline that MS bought into Corel) who saw what happened inside the organisation that it is grossly inaccurate to say they dropped it on the marketplace and expected it to sell itself. They did run paper advertisments and were dedicating half or more of stand space to Linux and it's (wine'd) Office suite (Draw et al having the other half).

I think the reason they didn't get very far is:

They didn't have any money

The only allies they could hope for (hackers) didn't go for it at all thanks to the incompatible libraries (though I updated a machine successfully to Debian 2.2 leaving behind the samba only, but then again maybe their internal network just suited well).

They didn't have any money

What could they do in the face of this? Could they re-write all the incompatible sections to placate us....NO they couldn't afford to. Could they change from wine for Linux apps... NO they couldn't afford to, they weren't getting money from Linux so in the face of the cost cutting required it was hard to justify expenese on Linux that might actually produce money from Draw/WP 10.

Where next......well after their minor success with their unix WP7/8 and an old draw I think they will be back to the Linux marketplace with a native app, the only questions are how long must we wait, will it be worth it or have MS killed it?

Ultimately I cannot see many/any traditional shrink-wrap software companies converting well into Linux land, they can't comprehend the underlying concept of using the GPL (not just LGPL) stuff out there and releasing products based on support et al rather than licensing revenue. Why didn't Corel just port their whole App suite to Gnome/KDE2 on all platforms rather than work on KDE and wine?

All of their problems probably would have been solved had it not been for the change in relative stock prices of Corel and Borland between the initial merger announcement and the critical dates. What was an attractive deal for both sides become a wholly unappealing deal for Borland shareholders and Corel lost a stay of execution AND the combined "powerhouse" that should have arrived on the Linux platform.

Disclaimer. The above are the conclusions I have drawn from my observations.....not the facts cause I don't know them....as if you all couldn't tell:-)

Come on people! Who has a word processor to compete with Word? And don't give me any malarky about the anemic substitutes that are left over. Who was closest to getting such a competetive threat to run on Linux?

Corel has something that no other Linux vendor on the planet can boast: industrial strength desktop applications. Whether or not this is a reflection of their innovative talent (it isn't) is moot. The fact is that they have acquired a suite desktop applications which, feature for feature, can compete with the best anyone has to offer.

Microsoft may not be able to control Linux itself, but with a few paltry millions, they have obtained control of a suite of applications which has the potential to threaten their desktop monopoly. Which in my opinion is more of a de-facto standard than the OS itself. People buy computers for the applications. Sendmail and Apache may be fun for the geeks among us, but most people want an office suite. Linux has other desktop application alternatives, but they have a long way to go to match the power of the application stable that Cowpland plowed under.

What does Microsoft lose by selling Corel's Linux interests? Not a damn thing. They can download an ISO image for free just like the rest of us.

>>they never should have attempted to sell a shrink wrapped box set of Linux and Corel Office. They should have sold the system through partners straight to law firms, and provided the technical support to back it up.

I don't think that's wholly correct. For one, law offices tend to be very conservative (pardon the pun) about what they install and use. Most of them are based on DOS or Windows and aren't interested in switching for the sake of running Linux.

>>Corel has been rudderless for far too long.

This, however, I have no argument with. Corel was once a real contender, but they have slowly foundered, no thanks to a lot of me-too strategies.

Anyone remember their Acrobat-style portable-document clone, Envoy? Remember what a gigantic hit that was? I don't know of a single site or service that uses Envoy as a document format, while I can barely avoid banging into sites that use Acrobat.

>>They attempted to enter the market with a product line that was under competition from free products, and predictably got horribly beaten within the Linux community.

I suspect they were not clear at all who they wanted to sell it too. If they had wanted to sell this to mainstream computer users, then they needed to do so effectively. It's clear they weren't trying to steal away RedHat or Slackware customers.

COREL exists because the Canadian government has used COREL products extensively over the
years. I don't have any exact figures on hand, but I can say with certainty that 80% of all of COREL's past
business has been with the Canadian Government.

Actually Corel's government business started declining seven years ago when the Liberals took over from Brian Mulroney's Conservatives(PCs). Cowpland was a big PC supporter as evidenced by their having a former PC cabinent minister and a former PC Ontario premier on the board of directors. Even the current CEO's father was a former Mulroney advisor. When the PCs lost the Liberals started giving contracts to Microsoft. In 1995, just after Corel bought WordPerfect, the Canadian military switched from WordPerfect to Microsoft(this is after having been standardized on WordPerfect for over 10 years). Revenue Canada did the same. Even though Corel sued RC and won some cash, RC still bought Microsoft. Now that the Liberals are in power for at least another 4 years would not expect this trend to reverse. The only exception to this is the external affair dept who have stayed with Corel so that all the embasseys would be using a Canadian product.

Most of Corel's business has been coming from the US govt, lawyers and universities. Only a tiny trickle of revenue comes from Canadian Govt depts.

Cardwhore seems to have been making a double snub. See articles above on clueless Corel and search for flame wars Debian vrs Red Hat, then laugh. No, it's not that funny but it beats another 12 hours of work.

Who would have paid for those "stable systems"? The law firm? Right...

Law firms are cheap bastards when it comes to IT. They bill everyone in the office out by-the-hour, so what the fuck do they care about efficiency. Flashing "MS Junk" makes them money.

That is, if they even spring for the flashing MS Junk. Most of them are standardized on WordPerfect... WordPerfect version 5 or 6. Current shipping version is 10, BTW.

WP/Novell/Corel have tried to sell suite software to these people. They won't buy. Hell, more often than not, they're using a 5 year old version of the mission-critical software (WP), bugs and all*, so write them off as worthless as a sales strategy.

* The Starr Report, written with WP6, had some scandlous deleted footnotes reappear when opened in WP9 or whatever.

You think that they wouldn't have required PPT4 compatibility if they didn't have thousands of PowerPoint files laying around? Or is that not important?

The whole "missing patch" thing makes me chuckle. Back in those days, WordPerfect Suite was big hairy ball of poorly-QA'd DLL hell. There was probably about 32 other patches and INI file hacks needed to get shit working almost properly. (Maybe WP is still this way, who knows since nobody uses it anymore, for some reason.) No Microsoft consipircy either, because Lotus has always worked fine.

The only thing that comes to mind is a Linux based gaming box. Possibly they're trying to create an XBox killer? Or maybe a new generation of stand-up arcade boxes. Or something else entirely using virtual reality and a Linux super-cluster. Either way, they got me intrigued.

Or maybe their just a front company for the Knights Templar/Priory of Zion.:-)

Many may argue... that it was a terrible mistake for Corel to enter the Linux market.
Personally, I think it was a good move at the wrong time.

It was a terrible mistake to enter the Linux distribution market.
Corel was going head-to-head with Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, et al.
How did it expect to succeed?
By pulling a mini-MSFT and bundling WordPerfect Office.

WordPerfect Office 2000 has not been well received, because it's a dog.
Conventional wisdom says the WINE layer slows it down.
Whether that's true or not, Linux users see it as kind of an affront--give me a native app., dammit!

There is demand for WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and Corel Draw for Linux.
I hope that Corel continues to develop these products.
Maintaining a good Linux distribution is a lot of work.
Corel should be applying that effort to improving the Linux ports of its bread-and-butter apps.

Corel may not be good for free software, but it can be good for Linux.
That's good enough for now.

I agree. Corel's distribution were horror show-worthy. I have both 1.1 and 1.2 on CD's and I have tried installing both of them on about 10 different computers, to no avail. I thought maybe it was me, but I have installed a lot of other distros with no problem (for the most part.) I could never (and still don't) understand why neither release of corel liked any of my hardware... I think the world will be better off without Corel's crappy distro. Thanks for reading all of my rambling.Cheers

I should also add three dirty words to that comment -- marketing, marketing, marketing. Brand recognition is really important, and a cute name always helps. Yahoo! is obvious, and SuSE has a certain ring to it (sort of like a girl's name), too. Red Hat isn't bad, either, but names like Yggdrasil, Caldera, Corel, etc. just don't cut it.

If you don't believe me, my (software) company's year end conference took place last week, and I sat in on the bulk of the presentation. One presentation was the results of some market research we had done, comparing my software company's recognition with target demographics in several categories against four other companies, including a dummy company that had a cute, semidescriptive name. That control company NEVER ranked last in any of the categories of research, including name recognition and quality of product.

I know we all hate them, but the Marketing department really is responsible for whether your next check is from the payroll or the unemployment office...

If trying to cluster Corel Linux systems sucked as much as trying to get anything else done on them (other than clicking on the pretty, Windows look alike icons), then I would say there is no way in hell that you could cluster a Corel distro based group of computers.

Honestly, I've never seen such a terrible piece of software claiming to be "Linux". And hopefully I never will again.

Most of Corel's business has been coming from the US govt, lawyers and universities. Only a tiny trickle of revenue comes from Canadian Govt depts.

I do not believe this is correct, there are many facets of the Canadian Gov. still locked into contracts with COREL. As I mentioned before, I do not have statistics at hand, or I would have posted all of them. I do however recall that not even a year ago, still a full 45% of Corel's business was from the Canadian government.

My father is a Manager for the Ministry of Community and Social Services, and they just switched their division over to MS in January, 2000. They had been trying to for 4 years previous but couldn't due to their contract with Corel.

You are entirely correct in stating that this goes back to Mulroney's PC's, they are the ones who signed on to stupidly long contracts for exorbitant amounts of money.
The proof is in the pudding is it not?

I don't think that's wholly correct. For one, law offices tend to be very conservative (pardon the pun) about what they install and use. Most of them are based on DOS or Windows and aren't interested in switching for the sake of running Linux.

No argument here. I'm not saying this is an easy or slam dunk strategy, but it is defensible to Corel's board of directors. It would have resolved their reliance on a competitor for the base OS and API, while allowing them as much control over the OS and API as they desire. It also would have provided a highly stable and proven operating platform with plenty of free backend products like web servers, SQL servers, mail servers, yada yada yada. It's a market strategy with which they might have succeeded. With channel partners pushing the platform onto their base market, and a legal industry still heavily dependent on WordPerfect, they might have pulled it off. Though it's pretty clear that they didn't have much chance selling CorelOffice at $100 to $200 a pop with Staroffice just a download away.

I might also argue that they could have saved the Corel Linux development costs and engineering time if they had partnered with Caldera instead. I suggest Caldera because that kind of marketing strategy is right up their alley. It's too bad. Corel employs some good engineers, and they help the Wine project immensely. But their senior management made some bad mistakes, and didn't stay the course on a market strategy which could potentially work, instead focusing on one thing after the next in a fruitless attempt to grab the quick buck. Welcome to bankruptcy, Corel.

I kinda wish that wxWindows was a little more popular. It's a wonderful idea, a C++ wrapper around the 'native' GUI widget sets on multiple platforms (Win32, OS/2, MacOS, GTK, Motif, etc), is relatively easy to write for, doesn't seem to have a huge effect on performance and makes it damn easy to port. Unless Borland's CLX is released soon and takes off, wxWindows seems like the best of the toolkits. Now if only someone would do a wxQT port so that I could write a single app and have it work seamlessly on either GTK (Gnome) or QT (KDE) depending on how it was built/what libs are installed. To be quite frank, the Gnome/KDE nonsense annoys me, and I wish they'd set aside their petty bickering and work together to make sure that while users have choice over what kind of 'desktop environment' they want to run, they don't have to compromise any of the apps designed for one when running the other. When I first read that people from KDE and Gnome collaborated to work on a unified object sharing system I was delighted, later it vanished and each went their own way, with Gnome sticking with Corba, and KDE using their 'KParts' system which uses an entirely different system. Now it seems the only part they are willing to collaborate on is the window manager 'hints' system, which is admittedly a rather small feature as far as a user would be concerned.

when it was still Corel's and I was appalled at how unfocused they were.

At the time, we (Comp Eng @ U of Toronto) were visiting Corel on a career exploration field trip to Ottawa (this was 2 years ago). We visited Corel Corp. and were very unexcited - nobody there could give us a cute motivational speach on why it's so great to work for Corel. The best point seemed to be "we get free cola."

Then we went to Corel Computer. Nobody was excited after what we saw in the software division. But I was just amazed at what I saw in this office. At the time, they were finishing work on the NetWinder [rebel.com]. This was the first I had heard of it and the idea of it was fascinating. The technical team was inspired. Our jaws dropped to the floor. Here were these people showing us a 15W computer that was powerful and extensible enough to be a web server, a development workstation, a tv set top box, a gaming machine, and pretty much anything else you wanted to push it to.. like a cluster on a common fibre backbone in one box (10 of these babies). This seemed like the future's primordial soup. Anything seemed possible.

The marketing people showed us all this and then I popped the question, "what are you guys going to sell this as?" They didn't know.. they had all these ideas and couldn't tell us what this was going to be sold as first. No marketing plan whatsoever. The box ran Corel Linux and KDE, I believe. The web server version could boot the system from memory for instant reboots. The web server cluster was supposed to be hot swappable soon (8 server and 2 controller motherboards in one box).

The whole place was wholly behind open source and linux. This machine caused some commotion at Microsoft from what I heard - it was that neat! (or at least this is the impression I got)

So what happened next? Nothing... I was stupefied, but I didn't hear about this thing until the division was sold to these rebel.com people who aren't really doing anything with it either and the technology is aging. They should've ipo'ed long ago and financed a marketing campaign for this thing.

This seems to be the trend in the entire company. They just don't know how to market their stuff. I remember looking at the pathetic ads they had for Corel Draw on taxi cabs. The image given by the company is poor. With a better marketing team (one with any skill whatsoever) these guys could be big again, their internal morale would increase, and they could put some cool stuff out. The way things are now, they are toast. And giving up Linux is bad move #2 after selling Corel Computer, which was a gem.

This was a typical Corel fuck-up. It reminds me of the WordPerfect for fuck-up a few years back; that particular little adventure costing Corel the best part of 50 million bucks. And before that was the network computers. And before that was the video conferencing. And before that was Corel Home...

I worked for Corel's localisation centre in Dublin for ~2.5 years, during which time I saw more savage stupidity and brute incompetence than one person should should have to see in a lifetime. Corel's top management could not get their head around the fact that they weren't just a garage start-up any more, that they were a big multinational company with big revenues and over 1,000 staff to look out for. Worse, it wasn't just a big company that thought it was a start-up; it was a company that thought it was a start-up, but with big company earnings. About as level-headed as a toddler with a tac nuke. Mike Cowpland was the worst. He took the company off on whatever crazy jaunt his magic 8-ball or the voices in his head or whatever the fuck told him to. The shareholders should have nailed his wrinkly ex-pat ass to the wall of Carling Avenue years ago.

There was no management, no processes, nothing that could by any stretch be called an organisation. The fall of Corel was inevitable. They were the engineers of their own doom. They were greedy and stupid, reaching out to grab new markets while their core business was eroding from underneath them.

I don't know. You certainly may be right as far as moronic buisness strategy, but a good while ago I used to get a lot of work done in Corel Draw [years ago, back when I was still dual-booting]. I hated having to shut down my system just to fiddle with graphics, so I largely stopped, and then came to enjoy the gimp.

But I have still always missed the vector-drawing / layout aspect of the Draw program. I did some neat zines, did layout for a local weekly, it was really pretty powerfull [and cheap] when you got the hang of it.

I was very seriously tempted to buy the Corel Draw for linux package, until a friend of mine was foolish enough to buy the wordperfect office suite. Not only did it have the indignity of insisting on installing itself all over the bloody filesystem, [as opposed to in one or two directories or usr/local like any proper unix package should [or can at least be coaxed to with a bit of bash scullduggery]]. Not only did it insist on installing init some unstable init font server...

But it also had this little problem of not running at all whatsoever. Yes, that's right. He paid 90$ for a nice shiny coaster in a big box. The software would immediately go into an infinite look of forked processes dumping core constantly whenever he would try to start it. He stripped out his version of wine, no good. He installed the samba off of the "Corel Linux" CD, no good. He finally gave up.

A real shame, as I would have been happy to give then 200$ for CorelDraw, if it actually worked at all.

BTW, does anyone know if this was just an issue with wordperfect office, or of anyway around it short of ditching your own installation and dual booting into "Corel Linux"?

Yes, this isn't a particularly insightfull post. I'm tired. Must get back to work. Haven't slept in 40 hours.

I finally find a distro that actually works and is as easy to use as any Windows produt. It's a shame to see it go. Time to dig out those (shudder) Redhat CD's - fight with stupid problems with X, network settings that dissapear on re-boot, and any other annoyances that I didn't get with Corral's distro.

Corel bought Ventura publishing, which is where they got their graphics expertise from. They did actually produce Draw (which was only supposed to sell a few hundred copies).

That is one area where I will admit that they have excelled. But they dropped the ball with WordPerfect in a big way. It was huge opportunity and they blew it.

Most of their problem is summed up nicely on their own web site: Corel Corporation has developed products known for excellence and value that target emerging trends in the software industry

There's something about "emerging trends" that have dot-commers kicking themselves right now. Corel would do well to pay attention to this. Rather than following, they should be making some trends of their own.

Corel's stock-in-trade are GUI apps aimed at Windows users. Given the state of the Linux desktop is it any surprise that they weren't able to succeed? I know that KDE/Gnome are getting better, but why blame Corel for what's really a more general (and well known) weak spot of Linux?

They couldn't survive selling Corel Draw for Corel Linux alone, they would have had to have been able to make it run under, what a half-dozen distributions, each with its own idea of what "stable kernel" means? At least two competing GUIs and another half-dozen hacked up variants? And printing -- what would they have done for Corel Draw printing?

At best they would have had achieved the success of Netscape on Linux -- a buggy, staticly-linked GUI app that everyone loves to hate. At worst they would have had a total config and support mess that would have never given them enough sales to make it pay for itself.

I don't think that's wholly correct. For one, law offices tend to be very conservative (pardon the pun) about what they install and use. Most of them are based on DOS or Windows and aren't interested in switching for the sake of running Linux.

The original poster was dead on. Corel should have shifted their base to their turf.

My sister works for a prominent firm in Chicago, and she is very annoyed with MS junk. Not being stupid, she gets rather upset when "tech support" asks her to reboot her computer again. She's lost enough work and enough time to try just about anything else. Talking paperclips, flashing banners and all that game junk was not what she wants from a computer. All she wants is a word processor, mail, and some elementery browsing for research.

Moreover, she was very warm to the whole linux thing. Lawyers demand transparency, so both the Free and Open Software models made great sense to her. It was easy for her to see that a software profesional without source was crippled, and then understood why tech support seemed so poor.

Had Correl droped stable systems on desks around her, she would have demanded one in short order.

RE: the Canadian military switched from WordPerfect to Microsoft(this is after having been standardized on WordPerfect for over 10 years).

I remember that - Corel decided to harass/investigate DND because they felt that the contract should have been awarded to them. Knowing some of the people who made that decision, I can safely say that the decision was the right one. Microsoft showed up on time with a product that worked and fit the spec.

Corel's demo blew up - they said they would come back the following week with a better version that had those things fixed.

DND doesn't allow "second chances" - "well, wait, I realise that what we're presenting doesn't work, let's just pump the handle a couple of times and try again". They can't. It's procedure.

If they'd wanted those contracts, they should have learned to read specs, and to code programs that fit same.

When Microsoft invested in Corel, in exchange for it joining the.NET initiative, many industry pundits contemplated that this was MS trying to put a finger in the Linux pie, partially incase MS is split up, and partially to convince the world that Microsoft is prepared to deal with competitors - and help widen the.NET base amongst users of other platforms.

So the question arises, if Corel isn't going to be a Linux vendor any more, why has Microsoft bothered to invest in them? Corel has little of any worth at the moment, and has been thought of as a "Linux shop" for the last two years. If MS intended Corel to be its way in the Linux world, it's not going to work. If MS bought Corel to try to damage the Linux world, that wont work either - removing Corel from the Linux market will barely make a dent in it, and will leave Corel on the sidelines unable to embrace and smother the platform from the inside.

Kept adding/backporting staff to KDE 1.1 which eventually ended up in KDE2 (corel wrote a great file-manager for KDE1, but there's konqueror now!), which (KDE2) was never included in their distro.

In the last couple of weeks, they've started merging some major work into the 2.1 CVS. I couldn't help suspecting that they're winding things down there. (Like in those suicide awareness brochures in high school where they warn you to worry if someone starts giving away his/her possessions.)

Personally, I think adding 5-6 MB to kdesupport is going to scare off new users and that there has to be a better way to distribute 1000+ large printer description files but what do I know?

So the question arises, if Corel isn't going to be a Linux vendor any more, why has Microsoft bothered to invest in them?

Well, all I can say is that I'm startled at the naivety of so many otherwise-intelligent people in not realizing that Microsoft's sole motivation in buying into Corel was to shut down a perceived threat to their desktop monopoly. Yes, it was a threat. Yes, Microsoft had to shut it down. If they had waited longer, Corel most likely would have been bought by a stronger company, taking Linux Corel Office out of Microsoft's reach.

Unfortunately, the strategem backfired, as Sun responded almost immediately by GPLing Star Office.--

Don't ask me why but it seems that the installer very often makes a balls of the users preferences and this command re-writes them correctly. Fixes a lot of broken installs. Just out of curiousity, did you or your friend contact Tech-Support (as your box entitles you). They may not have had the answer but you should give them a go before slating the product.

Corel 1997: Hmmm, Java isn't much good for more than silly little applets. This Office suite isn't working out. Where did all of our money go?

Actually, the fault really belongs neither to Corel or to Java. NCs were supposed to be the big thing in 98. That was also supposed to be the year Java VMs got stable and fast enough to support serious desktop apps. Which is why everybody was working on a Java office suite. And why Sun spent a fortune buying up companies like Lighthouse and Electric Paper to develop Java apps. Plus Sun, Corel, and a lot of other companies spent a fortune developing the NCs themselves. Only to find that nobody wanted to buy them. Sun, IBM, Oracle, etc., could afford to write off this mistake. Corel didn't screw up any worse, but...

We don't know anything about compilers. Let's buy Borland! Wait, we don't have any money.

That's not what happened. The merger was a stock swap, so they didn't need any money. Indeed, some sceptics thought the merger was just a con to raid Borland's rather fat bank account. Which perception has as much to do with the outcome as anything.

This has probably been said months before, but this could mean that WordPerfect is about to get new foster parents; it's like a haunted office suite, whenever a company gets it they have to sell it off eventually. I know they have not yet, but it's coming... too bad, I kinda liked that feature-rich suite before discovering LaTeX...

All I can say is that an idiotic company better not get it and ruin it like how Novell killed its market share.

At least, Corel is just selling it (whatever the price, 30 cents may be a good estimate...), and is not sending an email to their users stating:

"Thank you for participating. These softwares will stop working december 31st. If you have documents produced with these softwares, stop using Linux and go back to Windows, buy the Windows versions of our products. 2nd possibility: fuck off, we don't care, you stupid geek. Sincerly yours."

There was a picture of barbells, where the weights were blue squares (to match the color theme of the Corel box) and a headline that said "Power**3" or something like that. There was this picture of an older guy, with a lip piercing, and a little blue square on the lip ring. And so on.

These are the sort of ads you expect Apple to run: too-clever ads that don't reach out to new customers.

They should have said "Gain the power of Linux without retraining your people." "Stability and reliability are now easy to install and have a familiar face." Focus on the strengths of the product; don't try to make it cool. Business people won't buy Linux based on coolness!

There was a legendary bad ad years ago showing a human brain with a floppy disk stuck into it. That lip-piercing guy ad was almost as bad. Corel might as well have taken their ad budget and burned it.

If they had stuck with half of what they started they may have been really sucessful. A java office suite is not such a bad idea, an easy to use linux distro is not such a bad idea, but they take TIME. Corel wants a six month sensation. Get a clue guys, Microsoft can't make anything sucessful in less than three tries (Windows, Office, NT/2000, winCE?) but they get to the third try(even if the end product isn't so great at least someone BUYS it)!
You can't just take the buzz word of the day. put a spit shine on it, and make a billion without a little time.

It seems that every company that owns WordPerfect seems to tank. It's like Tolkien's Ring or something. First the WordPerfect Corporation itself, then Novell, now Corel.

Here's the sad story of a great application that suffered from a long string of bad management, unfair beatings from a big bad monopolist, and finally... competition from free software.

WordPerfect gives many of us a Warm Fuzzy. It's part of our collective history. But now we've got both StarOffice and KOffice for free, and open source... we might consider both WordPerfect and Corel to be simply the next fatality, the next commercial entity to get squashed by free software that is Just Better.

Mark Williams software (remember Coherent?) was the first. Microsoft will likely be the last. There's plenty of 'em in between -- WordPerfect is merely one of them.--

Regardless of the state of the Linux desktop, Corel did just drop their distribution into the marketplace. Those who know Linux would probably go for the distributions they know, those who don't probably wouldn't know that they should buy it. I suspect that any ten random slashdotters have probably done more Linux advocacy than Corel did.

If they'd have released Corel Draw for Linux, I would have bought it (really for Linux mind. Wine is fine for running win32 native stuff but I don't believe it justifies "for Linux")

I used to have great success running downloaded binaries under different kernels, different distributions. Of course, with kde and gnome on the scene it now seems like everything requires you to download last-night's version of the libraries. But someone writing commercial software should probably be able to avoid that annoyance with a bit of thought.

For printing, Corel could have done postscript, which is the "standard" for Unix or they could have done what people once did and include drivers with the application or heck, they could have developed a general Linux printing solution. Open Source is like that.

Agree with you on the Netscape part. Though when netscpae was being developed, the availability of non-commercial dynamically linkable widget sets was very sparse. KDE and Gnome can help that but things need to calm down a bit and people have to stop writing their code to use up-to-the-minute libraries and allow admins a bit of breathing space between upgrades.

I agree 100% -- it was a great idea poorly executed, just like their java and netwinder.

The correct execution would have included partnering with Dell or Compaq, integrating their software on their partners hardware, for a soup-to-nuts business solution. A single point of contact for all hardware and software problems.

Microsoft couldn't have beaten that (they don't due hardware, they just blame all their problems on the hardware).

My question is: what did they sell? The distribution or the applications?

If this new group is just a distribution vendor, then they're too little too late. If they get the applications, then do the get the Draw & Wordperfect source code too?

Furthermore, just what does the new company intend to do with it? If they try to sell it as a box at CompUSA, they'll fail as miserably as Corel did.

Does the new company have the resources for a soup-to-nuts solution? Do they have the clout to team with a big PC OEM like Compaq?

Umm...I'm willing to bet this IS Corel's participation in.NET. "Sell your Linux assests and we will give you 'undocumented' info on.NET. There by allowing us (Microsoft) to appear NOT to have a monolopy, when in fact we can put you out of business on a whim.

Even if there are now merely "islands of Corel" amongst the increasing "oceans of Microsoft" within the Canadian government, that confirms the all-critical political effect.

I'll bet that Corel sales reps have been tearing their hair (if not eyes!) out the last couple of years watching Canadian government contracts go to Microsoft.

The critical point is that the "stream" of revenue moves from "gushing river" towards "mere trickle."

I wasn't aware of Copeland's PC connections; that makes the entire situation make complete sense when it had never seemed sensible before.

When I saw Corel getting into the "SideWinder" business, the only way I could fathom the strategy being faintly sensible was if they could get some fat sales out of the Canadian government. The decline of Corel (in various ways) parallels the decline of ability to get such sales.

I only saw Sun give out StarOffice, nobody else has or had a competetive office suite available either gratis or licensed under the GPL. Where were those OSS zealots out to undercut Corel with a competetive office suite? Koffice and Gnome office is coming, but it'll be a year or two yet.
No. Corel attempted to sell boxed software to the Linux market while a major competetor undercut them by giving out an office suite for free. Just like Microsoft gave out Internet Explorer for free, but at least Sun didn't tie StarOffice into Linux -- they're just tying it into Gnome.

Corel's mistakes have nothing to do with dot-com maddness, and everything to do with a complete lack of strategy and planning. They have a withering market of law firms who continue to reluctantly buy WordPerfect because they like the product and have a history of templates and macros. Corel foolishly spend money and resources building their own distribution to sell in a saturated market, and then attempted to sell a boxed product for several hundred dollars while a free competitor ate their lunch. And on top of it they didn't provide the channel or technical support for migration to their base market. Can you give me a better example of what not to do?

"Corel was one of the very few companies to actually have a native linux wordprocessor (wordperfect 8). Why ditch that and go with wine?"

I don't know what you saw in wordprefect 8, but I hated it. It had bad printer support (used native drivers like DOS wordperfect used to) and bad font support (I could never get it to find any of my own fonts, just the ones it had in there).

If you want to get picky about 8, it had a terrible toolkit that was probably Motif, had a security flaw involving a symlink attack in/tmp, and when I tried to change around the toolbars it crashed and I had to wipe my prefs for it. There's probably more.

I liked 2000 until i switched to playing with LaTeX and I don't think it's perfect (far from it mostly because of wine), but it was better than 8. And porting the whole application suite to Linux is way too much work for any company no matter how large; they had no choice but to use wine. And they couldn't just imporve 8 since that was more like WordPerfect 6.

WPO2k and Graphics for Linux have not been well recieved because they're both extremely buggy and there has been little Corel commitment to fixing them. WINE isn't the biggest problem the suites have... if they worked well, people would probably forgive wine.

I only saw Sun give out StarOffice, nobody else has or had a competetive office suite available either gratis or licensed under the GPL. Where were those OSS zealots out to undercut Corel with a competetive office suite? Koffice and Gnome office is coming, but it'll be a year or two yet.

That's the question, isn't it? Given that Corel wasn't selling their office apps, was their main competition:A) Free/free office suitesB) HTML documents written in emacs and printed with NetscapeC) Corel giving its software awayD) Nothing - web servers and routers don't need an office suiteE) Booting into Windows

My completely off the cuff estimate: A -5%, B -1%, C - 4%, D - 50%, E - 40%. It would behoove whoever wants to take over their business to know the answer to that question.

Doing WINE ports of their apps, while it boosted WINE and made it easy for them to make their applications "cross-platform", rendered them slow and somewhat unstable. Simply put, there was no value in using Corel's applications at the prices they were asking for them. If I want slow, bloated apps, I'd have bought StarOffice (but, it's free now, isn't it?) or I'd be using Windows and MS Office still.

No, this is not about an infant desktop. This is about a company that couldn't execute good business decisions to save their lives. If they don't get back to their core, original business, this money from this divestiture will do nothing for them.

I've an after-hours sysadmin customer that's the head of a small law firm in Dallas. He just wants something stable and something compatible with what they are using at the courthouses. If he could get legal practice management software worth it's salt (the options for Linux aren't quite what he or most practices need...) and get an office suite that is like WordPerfect, or does an excellent job of approximating the same- and doesn't up and eat his appointments, etc. He'd jump at it. He'd have went to Linux if I could have found a decent Linux based law practice management system. He's as conservative as they come- and he's fed up with Windows and the BS he's had to deal with while using it.

It was thought that the Borland/Corel merger was good because it would bring great tools to the linux platform. Why doesn't Borland buy Corel's linux division? It's only 5 mil which is a pittance in this industry.

Corel 1995: We don't know jack about office productivity software. Hey! We could buy the staff and rights to the ex-most-expensive office suite on the planet! You can make a lot of money with trendy office software.

Corel 1996: We don't know jack about Java, but someone said it's the next big thing. Hey! A Java office suite!

Corel 1997: Hmmm, Java isn't much good for more than silly little applets. This Office suite isn't working out. Where did all of our money go?

Corel 1998: We better lay off all of those expensive WordPefect employees because we can't afford them. Back to not knowing anything about office apps.

Corel 1999: We don't know anything about Linux, but someone said it was going to Take Over the World. Hey, let's make a Linux distro!

Corel 2000: We don't know anything about compilers. Let's buy Borland! Wait, we don't have any money. We spent the Linux money last week when we bought Bryce3d. Not that we know anything about graphics, either. All of our graphics software was acquired from other companies in the first place.

Corel 2001: MS gave us some money. We'd better get rid of our Linux shop so we can focus on.Net. It's going to be trendy.

Corel 2002: Maybe we could make WordPerfect for.Net, except we don't know how it works because all the developers are laid off. Hmm, maybe we could get into the Lawn Mower business. We could call it... Mitel. Or something.

Let's face it, Corel is nothing but a fancy dot-com that only survives off the carcases of other products that they manage to "acquire." If they knew how to "innovate" maybe things would be different.

About four years ago I speculated with friends that Linux could be made a real marketplace/desktop force through the help of an applications/software company with clout. The only company I could think of offhand was Corel. Sure enough, when Corel Linux came out, I was excited -- here we would have some really good choices, at last! WordPerfect and Corel Draw in Linux, just for openers...

And, wouldn't you know it, Corel apparently had no idea how to push it. They packaged it right, but they didn't capture the attention of people who were sitting on the Microsoft fence and looking for an excuse to jump. No ad campaigns. No whitepapers. No grassroots motivation. They just dumped it in the marketplace and expected it to catch fire all by itself.

While it's nice to have WordPerfect for Linux and all that, and I doubt MSFT really forced the issue, the thing is that Corel caused more harm than good to Linux.

I'm not saying they had a bad distro, I'm just saying that their jerking around and cash flow concerns about them tarnished the whole Linux industry. If we only had companies like Red Hat and VA Linux Systems involved, the industry would be regarded as far more stable, and the recent add-on of mainstream companies like IBM, HP, and Compaq would be regarded by Wall Street as much better news. But Corel has dragged it all down.

It amazes me how companies with such large
overhead, and accustomed to a diet of huge
revenue streams, think they can get into
Linux, and make it Just Another Product.
Everything about the Linux culture
is too fundamentally different for outsiders
to just come in and 'make it work' as a business.

Small is beautiful, not only in code, but also
in the boardroom/executive suite.

I'm not saying no one can live off Linux support
(of course not, I do!), but throwing big money
and lots of people at Linux doesn't make it
profitable automatically.
Especially when a company like
Corel attacks it with a full set of overhead
costs. Corel Linux (1.0 and 1.1) were, IMO,
horrible distributions, and it's obvious to
me that Corel was trying to 'microsoft' it's
way to the desktop. I'm glad I won't have
to face another distro from THEM!

This is more support for my view that the
best, innovative, healthiest companies
lean towards the small side, and that simply
BEING a big company is a handicap when
trying to grok Linux.

Many may argue, rightly or wrongly, that it was a terrible mistake for Corel to enter the Linux market. Personally, I think it was a good move at the wrong time. They attempted to enter the market with a product line that was under competition from free products, and predictably got horribly beaten within the Linux community.

But it was still a good idea. If they had stayed the course and shifted their base market of law firms over to Linux, they would have saved their base the unnecessary costs of Windows, while at the same time preventing Microsoft from pulling the OS API rug out from under them once they become a serious threat to MSOffice again. The shift to Linux was nothing more than self defense for Corel... they never should have attempted to sell a shrink wrapped box set of Linux and Corel Office. They should have sold the system through partners straight to law firms, and provided the technical support to back it up.

But Corel has been rudderless for far too long. They've attempted a Java office suite which went nowhere. And now, they attempted to enter the Linux market rather than use Linux to shift their own market to their own turf, and now they're back to square one. What a shame, since WordPerfect is still a damn good wordprocessor.

Rather than making a distribution, they should have focused on making the apps to sell first. And they shouldn't have used WINE unless they could have had decent levels of performance- which, currently, the Linux versions don't because they're using WINE.

It's getting harder to see where Corel is actually going these days. Still, the conspiracy theorists will have a field day linking this to the MS.NET support. But with sales of Corel Draw 9 not up where the company wanted them and increasing numbers of people happy with their current version of WordPerfect, it doesn't look like a particularly healthy revenue stream. MS has this problem too - people may be happy with the software they currently have (\{deity} help them) - but MS has the additional leverage of both new versions of the OS and the guarantee of more PC's being sold with MS software pre-installed on it.